Lambada
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Lambada is a fast, sensual Brazilian dance for couples or groups, typically performed with the stomachs touching. The dance became internationally popular in the 1980s. The exact origin of the dance is somewhat disputed but it is known to have begun in Brazil and has forerunners such as the forró, sayas, the maxixe, and the carimbó.
Lambada hit by Kaoma
At the end of the 1989 summer, a couple of French business men came to Brazil and bought the musical rights of about 300 lambada songs. They went back to France, and created the Kaoma Band and generated a lot of money on marketing, turning Lambada a world-wide known style, reaching even the far east of Japan in which Lambada is danced until nowadays.
Lambada entered the global mainstream when the French pop group Kaoma recorded a number one worldwide summer hit "Lambada" which sold 5 million singles in 1989. In Portuguese the Lambada song is called Chorando se foi which means the one who left crying.
In the music video, there were two young children, named Chico and Roberta, performing the lambada dance. They shortly thereafter started their own musical career.
The Lambada song was actually an unauthorized translation of the song Llorando se fue (1982) (which means: the one who left crying), from the Bolivian group Los K’jarkas. See Music of Bolivia article for more about the translation of this song. At the cover of that Bolivian album, the title was Lambada. So Lambada also has some origins in Bolivia.
